A Military History
1945 - 1991 was the era of the cold war. During this time United States forms the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to establish US lead in science and technology applicable to the military.

From an idea to the World Wide Web
Paul Baran was commissioned by the U.S. Air Force to do a study on how it could maintain control over its missiles and bombers, after a nuclear attack.

The key idea is to develop a decentralized network that could survive a nuclear strike.
If any cities in the U.S. were attacked, the military could still have control over nuclear arms
for a counter-attack. Well, we all have our opinion on what's important but luckily this research
lead to what we call the "Internet" today.

Baran's final proposal was a packet switched network.

"Packet switching is the breaking down of data into data grams or packets that are labeled to indicate the origin and the destination of the information and the forwarding of these packets from one computer to another computer until the information arrives at its final destination computer. This was crucial to the realization of a computer network. If packets are lost at any given point, the message can be resent by the originator."

Packet Switched Networks

· Data is broken into small units, called packets.
· Each packet contains a destination address.
· Each packet is routed individually through the network.
· At the destination address packets are assembled into the initial file.
· Data paths are always available.

The advantage of a packet switched / decentralized network is that all data paths are shared all the time between all users and networks.

The regular voice telephone is a circuit switched / dedicated network. The "path" to a user is unavailable to others for the duration of a phone call.

This image shows packets, being exchanged between the Internet and individual computers. The router plays a very important role: it directs the packages, based on the address to the right place where they get resembled to the whole media file. Every network needs a router The Internet is a huge network that contains many networks, which contain networks…

The idea of a decentralized network developed during the following years:
The first network was set up with four stations in 1969 between four west coast universities.
The protocol used in the first network allowed only data transfer between hosts
running on the same network. In 1973 development began on the protocol later to be called TCP/IP.
This new protocol was to allow diverse computer networks to interconnect and communicate with each other.

TCP/IP Protocol
To run information on a network a protocol is needed. In information technology,
a protocol is the special set of rules that end points in a telecommunication connection use.
Protocols resemble packets and deliver data to the right address and communicate with
each other on a level of functionality.

To make the Internet available not only to scientists in universities and the military,
many important developments and inventions have taken place in the past 20 years,
such as the development of:
· Email
· Satellite networks
· Faster computers
· Domain name system (DNS)
· Fast connections
· Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)

And many many more… (Some already forgotten)

Hypertext and HTML
Movie director Theodore H. Nelson (Requiem for a Heavyweight), coined the term "hypertext" over 30 years ago, saying, in Literary Machines:

"By 'hypertext' I mean nonsequential writing--text that branches and allows choice to the reader,
best read at an interactive screen. As popularly conceived, this is a series of text chunks connected
by links which offer the reader different pathways."

In 1990, computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee used the concept of hypertext to invent the World Wide Web.
His initial specifications, including HTML, were refined during the next few years with the help of other people as the Web technology spread.

One more thing
Much has happened to open the Internet to many diverse groups:
· Inventers
· Entrepreneurs
· Hackers
· Shoppers
· Political Activists
· Business and Commerce
· Artists
· Writers
· Information Freaks